Jul 23 2008 - Seattle PI
by SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
War turned life in the former Yugoslavia into a nightmare of death, torture and suffering that, for many survivors, continues today. The arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic offers hope of a new measure of justice.
Karadzic was president of a breakaway Serb regime during some of the fiercest fighting in the 1990s. He is accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Among other things, prosecutors charge him with responsibility for the disastrous siege of the ex–Olympic city of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 at Srebrenica.
Aug 01 2008 - Seattle PI
by Stanley Crouch
We should somehow be happy now that Radovan Karadzic – the "butcher of Bosnia" – has been brought in alive, captured after 12 years that were not exactly lived on the run but in plain sight behind a heavy beard, white hair and glasses. His career moves included psychiatry, ethnic nationalism, government official and fomenter of enough xenophobia to make murder much more palatable to the Serbian masses.
When captured, the butcher had made a new career move from genocide into medicine and was something of an expert on health foods. The gristle from human bones and the health drink of human blood were not what he advised for consumption. Karadzic is, after all, no longer in charge.
Jul 27 2008 - Seattle PI
by ADRIAN HAMILTON
"Closure" is the word that people keep using about Radovan Karadzic's arrest and likely trial for war crimes in The Hague. And in the sense of the closing of a chapter it is probably the right word –– or would be should the real nasty in the Bosnian massacres, Gen. Ratko Mladic, be caught. If the specialists are to be believed, that should follow soon.
One just fears that, if Karadzic was tracked down fairly easily once the will was there, Mladic may prove more difficult if he has actually gone to ground. It took the Italian police, after all, more than 40 years to capture the Sicilian mafia boss, Bernardo Provenzano, and that was not for want of trying (read Clare Longrigg's enthralling new book on the subject, "Boss of Bosses").
Jul 25 2008 - Seattle Times
by Richard Holbrooke
Standing with Slobodan Milosevic on the veranda of a government hunting lodge outside Belgrade, I saw two men in the distance. They got out of their twin Mercedeses and, in the fading light, started toward us. I felt a jolt go through my body; they were unmistakable. Ratko Mladic in combat fatigues, stocky, walking as though through a muddy field; and Radovan Karadzic, taller, wearing a suit, with his wild but carefully coifed shock of white hair.
The capture of Karadzic on Monday took me back to a long night of confrontation, drama and negotiations almost 13 years ago — the only time I ever met him. It was 5 p.m. on Sept. 13, 1995, the height of the war in Bosnia. Finally, after years of weak Western and U.N. response to Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, U.S.–led NATO bombing had put the Serbs on the defensive. Our small diplomatic negotiating team — which included then–Lt. Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Christopher Hill (now the senior U.S. envoy to North Korea) — was in Belgrade for the fifth time, trying to end a war that had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people.
Jul 24 2008 - Seattle PI
by VESNA PERIC ZIMONJIC
The revelations keep coming. After news of the dramatic capture of Radovan Karadzic and his astonishing disguise as the spiritual healer Dragan Dabic, the Serbian capital was abuzz with the discovery of a secret love –– a dark–haired woman nicknamed Mysterious Mila.
"Radovan was a guru in love," blared one headline. Journalists at Healthy Life magazine, for which Dabic penned an irregular column, said that Mila accompanied him to almost every lecture and seminar that he gave around the country on alternative therapies.
Editor's Comments:
I wonder why the media never complainied about Clinton failing to capture this guy. bbm
Jul 23 2008 - Seattle Times
Details of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic are fuzzy and conflicting, but his ability to elude capture for 13 years after indictment for his role in the slaughter of thousands is quite clear.
No one ever tried very hard to find him, including the international community, but especially other Serbs.
One account has the former Bosnian Serb president arrested Monday by Serbian secret police. Another has him snatched off a bus last Friday in Belgrade.
Jul 23 2008 - Times Union, Albany NY
Before Saddam Hussein and his feared weapons of mass destruction, before the more recent high–stakes confrontations with Kim Jong Il and North Korea, before Mahmood Ahmedinejad of Iran became such a threat to stability in the Mideast and well beyond it, no list of the world’s bad guys was complete without the name Radovan Karadzic right at the top.
Just consider the offenses with which the leader of the self–declared Bosnian Serb Republic long had been charged but had eluded capture for more than a decade. There’s genocide, of course, for the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the besieged Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in 1995. Then there’s extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts and other crimes against humanity.
Jul 11 2008 - Seattle PI
SARAJEVO, Bosnia–Herzegovina –– For a few hundred dollars, Hasan Nuhanovic learned that his mother managed to fatally slice open her veins moments before six armed men burst into her jail cell near the end of the Bosnian war.
Jun 19 2008 - Washington Times
A European Union peacekeeping helicopter belonging to the Spanish military crashed Thursday in Bosnia with four crew members on board, officials said.
May 29 2008 - San Francisco Chronicle
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) ––A United Nations report released Thursday says the Balkans, a region once known as a hotbed of crime and violence, has become one of the safest zones in Europe.
Feb 27 2008 - San Francisco Chronicle
Police fired tear gas at Bosnian Serb rioters to prevent them from storming the building of the U.S. consulate after protests against Kosovo's independence.
Feb 26 2008 - San Francisco Chronicle
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia–Herzegovina (AP) –– Police fired tear gas at Bosnian Serb rioters Tuesday to prevent them from...
Sep 16 2007 - Seattle Times
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia ? The tip was vague but promising, like so many other recent leads that had failed to pan out.
"One of the accused could be attempting to cross the border near the village of Bratunac," was the message relayed to Dragan Milosevic, chief police investigator in Republika Srpska, the Serb–governed sector of Bosnia. "The accused," Milosevic recalled in an interview, could have referred only to five Bosnian Serb fugitives charged with committing crimes against humanity during their country's 1992–95 ethnic civil war.
Feb 27 2007 - San Francisco Chronicle
by Jeffrey Fleishman Zoran Cirjakovic
The United Nations' highest court ruled Monday that Serbia failed to prevent the massacre of Muslims during the Bosnian war but was not directly responsible for the atrocities, ending a landmark case in which an entire...
Feb 26 2007 - Washington Times
THE HAGUE –– In one of the most momentous cases in its 60 years, the United Nations' highest court will deliver its judgment today on Bosnia's demand to make Serbia accountable for the slaughter, terrorizing, rape and displacement of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s.
If it rules for Bosnia, the International Court of Justice could open the way for compensation amounting to billions of dollars from Serbia, the successor state of Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Specific claims would be addressed later.
Oct 01 2006 - Seattle Times
SARAJEVO, Bosnia–Herzegovina ? Bosnians will vote today in what may be the most important elections since the war here ended 11 years ago ? a vote for leaders who will get a chance to run the country without international supervision if they can overcome ethnic divisions.
Since the end of the 1992–95 war, important decisions have been made by an international administrator. Now the administrator's office has announced that it will close next year if newly elected leaders can implement reforms that will take the country closer to joining the European Union.
Apr 18 2006 - Seattle Times
by Are terrorists recruiting "white Muslims"?
SARAJEVO, Bosnia–Herzegovina ? Thousands of Islamic fighters, or mujahedeen, came to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim side during the country's 1992–95 war. But militants, including some with suspected ties to al–Qaida, were active in the region even before it dissolved into ethnic conflict, according to an analysis compiled jointly by U.S. and Croatian intelligence and obtained by The Associated Press.
Apr 02 2006 - San Francisco Chronicle
The new Auschwitz no one had imaged
Patti McCracken
We sat at a table near the window overlooking a slim patch of river –– a rather unremarkable river, except in the way it slithered by unnoticed on its way out of town. The air was still, so thick and still, and it was...(Funny, I haven't seen any stories like this about Saddam. Oh, I forgot, Bosnia was Clinton's war, Iraq is Bush's. bbm)
Dec 10 2005
By Julie Mertus Ten years ago, I wrote an op–ed piece in the New York Times urging that Kosovo Albanians be included in the Bosnia peace talks then being held in Dayton, Ohio. I warned that the nonviolent strategy of Kosovo Albanians was endangered by an increasingly impatient population which was beginning to believe that the United States would only recognize their plight if they took up arms.
Nov 23 2005 - Washington Times
by Nicholas Kralev
The Bush administration yesterday brokered an agreement among the leaders of Bosnia–Herzegovina's three main ethnic groups to revise the country's constitution and centralize power in a single strong government.
